Barry Zuckerkorn

If you think that society was friendlier to trans people in 1999 compared to 2024, you are mistaken.

Ha, ok, I definitely got whooshed then.

It’s the meme format:

“Men will literally (something) but not go to therapy”

People who use it don’t necessarily endorse the original view, but are making fun of it.

I’m skeptical of this theory as well, but I’d point out that our observations show that at galaxy scales, gravity is much stronger in certain places than we’d predict using our current model of gravity and the matter we can otherwise detect, and at even larger scales the acceleration of the universe’s expansion is being driven by something we don’t understand.

Right now, the dominant theory in cosmology is that each of these observed phenomena are driven by dark matter and dark energy, but we don’t have any direct evidence of the existence of either, just indirect evidence that stuff doesn’t behave as we might expect.

So it’s a choice between theories that don’t make intuitive sense, and break some fundamental assumptions about physics.

As of last year, English Wikipedia, articles only, text only, was about 22GB compressed (text compresses pretty efficiently), according to the current version of this page:

As of 2 July 2023, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 22.14 GB without media

Some other sources describe the uncompressed offline copies as being around 50 GB, with another 100 GB or so for images.

Wikimedia, which includes all the media types, has about 430 TB of media stored.

I agree with you.

An apathetic populace is how despots or oligopolies consolidate or retain their power.

Activism doesn’t always work, but there are plenty of historical examples of big social changes coming on the back of direct action by the people.

On the specific topic here, of greenhouse emissions, the U.S. has been decreasing its per capita emissions for something like 15-20 years. We have a long way to go, and should be going faster, but we are making progress right now. And none of this progress was inevitable. It was specific efforts by nonprofits, by governmental entities, by private industry, and by individuals to demand lower emissions.

Past environmental successes include the elimination of acid rain, the reversal of the hole in the ozone layer, and the vast improvement in outdoor particulate pollution and smog in the past few decades. This stuff matters, we have been making a difference, and the moment we give up we will start backsliding.